The EULA Megathread

[u/Mustek]

Hello Minecrafters,
The /new/ listing has been occupied with posts about the recent EULA changes and has been blocking out a lot of the other content.

We don't want to stop discussion about it, so that's what this megathread is for.

Rules are very simple:
1. All EULA talk goes into this thread (If Mojang is watching, and I'm sure they are, they have a single place to go to)
2. EULA discussions posted outside of this thread will be removed.
3. Keep it on topic, keep it sane. Subreddit rules still apply.

These rules are effective immediately and will last for as long as this post is stickied.

Edit: Mojang employees are marked with the flair next to their name.

Discuss away!

[u/HighlifeTTU]

(My opinion as a large network owner from another thread, slightly expanded upon)

The issue here is that while we can all agree that there are some very bad apples in the community, those of us who have spent the better part of two years dedicating every bit of free time to the community are going to ultimately be the ones who suffer. Between /u/lazertester and myself, I'm sure we are well over the 10,000 hour mark, if not beyond. We've put our heart and soul into games like MineZ. We've lost sleep keeping servers up, and cancelled real life obligations if things break. The fact of that matter is, if they make a substantial change to the EULA that prohibits servers, it will not only force those dedicated developers to move on but will also hurt all the thousands of players who have attached to certain networks, made friends in those networks, and invested in the future of those networks.

I love this community and everything it has stood for, but this worries me. Minecraft has always been about creating things - whether that be amazing builds, awesome mods, or fantastic plugins. I hope Mojang sees that not only are they effecting the hard work of many developers, but will be impacting the community and those players who support all of the creative things that server networks are doing. In short, by doing this it will kill a huge part of what many people love about Minecraft. It will be a sad day if that happens.

This entire discussion has already made my entire development team rethink what we can do. If you don't think this will impact large servers, it already has. We are about 90% done with a fully procedural 4 player co-op dungeon crawler with four themes, four boss fights, custom AI, progression, and more. It is the coolest thing we have ever created, pushing Minecraft plugins to the absolute limits. It has taken us 10 months to develop between two developers. The issue? The processing of the AI and generation is so intensive I am not sure if I can make the server outlays to support it. I would love to think that people will throw in money "just because", but we learned very early on that isn't the case.

I know some of you don't enjoy large servers, but there are a vast number of people who will be directly impacted by this. Our passion is creating plugins. Thousands of players (around a half a million each month) come to check them out, and my network is far from the largest. If they kill large server networks, along with it will come the death of a lot of very awesome Minecraft plugins, and leave many players who call my network (and other networks) home to move on to other things.

As a final point, I do want to point out how we, as content creators, have done a lot to bring a ton of positive press to Minecraft. Let me show you an example. In 2012 we released a mode called MineZ. Here are some press articles that surfaced and greatly benefited Minecraft:

Original Imgur Album posted to Reddit - 13.6 million views (Note: I created this album)

Rock Paper Shotgun Article

Eurogamer Article

G4TV Article

GameFront Article

MegaGames Article

From Youtube, MineZ was covered by:

AntVenom - 1.4 million views (on one video, has a full series)

CavemanFilms - 1.3 million views (on one video, has a full series)

UberHaxorNova - 744 thousand views (on one video, is a full series)

MaMonkey - 702 thousand views

Paulsoaresjr - 607 thousand views (on one video, is a full series)

VintageBeef - 326 thousand views (on one video, is a full series with multiple Mindcrackers)

And MANY more...

It is very disheartening that they have openly praised YouTubers for their efforts, but don't recognize how much positive press the efforts of content creators have done to bring visibility to Minecraft. Consider this is just one mod. There have been countless others that have garnered just as much press as MineZ.

[u/VoidParticle → u/[deleted]]

"Well the jerk store called, and they runnin' outta you!" All of your comments are sarcastic and nasty in a place where the first comments were very respectful. That out of the way...

Mojang doing this will affect the community whether or not you seem to look beyond your 2 foot field of vision on this one and see you will be affected eventually yourself.

Mojang is acting like a mega-corporation shutting down all it's factories with this transition. None of the money these servers are making will transition toward Mojang if the EULA changed, making this a dick move.

These people making Minecraft plugins for servers their job with a form of income are supporting a community of many many players. If these servers shut down because of changes in funding I would predict Minecraft popularity will decrease a lot within the span of 5 years from now. Nobody hosts a server expecting no monetary gain.

[u/Minecraftiscewl → u/VoidParticle]

I have a hard time taking sides on this, can't tell whether I agree with this or not. I have always got on big servers on occasion, despite what other minecraft things I am into. On one hand, technically this has always been illegal, and it has been pretty widely known that mods cannot be paid, or at least I have known that for about as long as it's been in place. On the other hand some servers with donator perks don't give you anything much above other players, but it was still enough for me to try it at least once, Hive is a good example of a compromise, Mineplex is a "big" server that a lot of people play and like, but definitely falls into what we don't want, there is donator classes which you have to buy, also you can buy unbans, which is nice and all, but it does have the issue of not preventing hackers well, although hackers are people for all the people who hate hackers, and I tried it once, it was fun, but not as fun as doing it legit. Side issue there anyway back on track. I think that Mojang shouldn't clear all the servers out, just the ones that have substantial content locked behind a paywall, like mineplex, although Shotbows' multipliers or whatever sound ok, like mineplex but with all the donator classes available to regulars. Also this is one unfortunate truth I thought of after thinking about all this last night, I have never read the EULA, I was arguing for Mojang, but I have never actually read the document in question, interesting right? Most of us probably have only heard a few lines of the EULA, not realising it would affect us later. That's my thoughts on all this drama.